Cal men begin year-in-the-making trip to China

The Cal men's basketball team was swarmed by local fans upon its Sunday arrival in China.

Photo: Cal Athletics

The Cal men’s basketball program is hoping to turn something that took more than a year of toiling with logistical nightmares into an eight-day experience in China that the players will remember fondly for the rest of their lives.

“It’s literally been the coordination of planes, trains and automobiles,” Cal senior associate athletic director Foti Mellis said. “It’s been a lot of work, but it has been refreshing to get to do something different. I’m looking forward to seeing the players’ faces as they experience things they’ve never experienced before.”

Mellis shouldered a large share of the planning load because Cal was searching for an athletic director during much of the process and the head of basketball operations was recruited away from the school by the Pac-12.

It all started more than a year ago, when Cal had to work out a contract with Yale for a game in Shanghai (8 p.m. Friday on ESPNU). After months of laboring to agree to detailed language in the deal, the Pac-12 was able to announce in November 2017 that the Bears would be the fourth team from the conference to play in the annual season opener in China.

Cal decided on a travel party of 29 people, 25 of whom are being paid for by the Pac-12/Alibaba Group sponsorship agreement. Mellis worked with the conference and a travel agency to find flights, four practice facilities and an arena for the game, two high-speed trains, a river cruise and all of the meals and cultural events in between.

Most of the itinerary was set until the middle of last week, when China President Xi Jinping announced he would be in Shanghai and shutting down waterways and schools during a portion of the Bears’ trip.

“You’re dealing with a foreign country, and their government is setting the rules,” Mellis said. “We just have to kind of roll with it.”

Mellis showed his adaptability while securing the visas for the traveling party, which includes athletic director Jim Knowlton, executive director of the athletic study center Derek Van Rheenen, a videographer, an additional student manager and Cal women’s basketball player Chen Yue, who is acting as an ambassador for the school.

Obtaining a visa for China involves sending an original passport to the consulate, and after it and a four-page application are reviewed, the passport is returned with a visa. It’s all based on the applicant’s permanent address, so Mellis was dealing with consulates in Washington, D.C., Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever done,” he said. “All five consulates basically got to make up their own rules and determine if they were going to approve the applicants. ... It was wild, but I feel like I’m an expert now on how to get visas quickly.”

Matt Bradley, a freshman guard from San Bernardino, doesn’t have a California driver’s license or identification card. His visa didn’t arrive until days before the team left San Francisco on Saturday and flew to Los Angeles ahead of the 13-hour flight to China.

“I’m really excited to experience the different culture, getting to be in a different environment and interacting with different people,” he said. “Obviously, the basketball part will be great, too. But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

The players had widely differing thoughts about the trip.

Forward Justice Sueing, whose father played overseas, realized that he’ll have experiences that he’ll tell his grandchildren one day. Guard Darius McNeill was open about the anxieties that accompany traveling outside of the United States for the first time.

Freshman guard James Zhao, who is from Beijing and played on the under-17 Chinese national team, was part of pre-trip meetings that outlined basic dos and don’ts while traveling, offered some Mandarin phrases to expect and detailed the technological differences that will limit the players’ communication outside of the hotels.

He’s also acting as the teacher’s assistant for a one-credit course called “One Week in China: Travel Writing, Cultural Exploration and Self Discovery,” which will be taught by Van Rheenen, who has been on the Cal faculty for more than 20 years.

“The basketball game against Yale is obviously the culmination of the trip, but I don’t see that as the primary purpose,” he said. “These opportunities are so much bigger and so much broader. They’re going to come away from this as global citizens.”

Rusty Simmons has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle as a reporter since 2002, when he moved to the Bay Area from Texas — via Washington, D.C., Seattle and Germany. He covered prep sports and then Cal football and basketball before assuming the Golden State Warriors beat in 2009. Along with regularly breaking news and putting creative spins on big-issue stories within the Cal athletics beat, Rusty spends his offseasons writing human-interest features on the Bay Area sports landscape.